The institutional left in America has wasted pages and pages attempting to tar tea partiers as anti-government quasi-anarchists who have abused the freedoms granted to them under the Constitution to advocate for a radical, possibly violent overhaul of the present system, without so much as a scrap of an idea about what the replacement should be. How ironic, then, that there is a movement on the left which is presently making a nuisance of itself, and which fits all of the descriptors outlined above.
I speak, of course, of the absurdly named “Occupy Wall Street” movement — a name whose absurdity is aptly demonstrated by the fact that the people in question have thus far posed no more danger of being an occupying force than your average homeless vagrant. Even so, the vagrants are wiser, if not more obliging, for it is precisely that militaristic metaphor used by the protesters in question that makes their never-ending cries of “police brutality” particularly unsympathetic. In fact, far from being eloquent demonstrations of repressed freedom, the viral videos of said “brutality” make the protesters appear more like the peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“Help! Help! I’m being repressed!”) than like, say, the brave protesters at Tiananmen Square.
The facts, as presented by the protesters, are as follows: Police officers have been routinely engaging in exercises of brutality — such as putting helpless, nonviolent protesting women in pens and spraying them with pepper spray, or placing their knees on equally nonviolent protesters’ throats for imagined offenses while handcuffing them.
The facts, as presented by their videos, are quite different. The women sprayed by the cops in the video showing the “pen,” firstly, are not fenced in. There are large crowds gathered within sight of the camera who are not fenced off, and into whom the women could easily have retreated. Alas, they instead choose to stubbornly stand and shout at the police like spoiled children, all while it becomes progressively more clear that they are obstructing the officers. At this point, an officer clad in white sprays the women with a single round of pepper spray, presumably as a warning. The women are not arrested after this, nor are they molested in any way. The spray was simply a method used to force their retreat — something they could have chosen to effect at any time.
Similarly, the video showing the protester with the knee on his neck does not portray him as nearly the helpless victim his compatriots allege. Instead, the camera cuts away oddly right before the protester in question (who has been screaming at the police officers the whole time) is cuffed. During that couple of seconds that the camera is turned away, not only could anything have happened, but given that the man in the video looks spoiling for a fight as is, and the officers have already been arresting similarly disruptive protesters, odds are something did happen.
But even if some of the videos do show instances of police brutality, this is all to obscure the wider point, which is that these officers need no apology. This so-called “police brutality” is, in fact, a rational response to deeply irrational people. Only liberals and a few of their misguided friends in the libertarian right would disagree. Social unrest is a cancer, and trying to suppress it is the only logical response from those whom we trust to guard the body politic. These officers are doing their best in that endeavor.
The irony that a group of overgrown children should protest one of the oldest capitalist institutions while draped in the mass-produced garb of capitalist enterprises built on the investment of the various bankers they want to guillotine (with Roseanne Barr cosplaying as Madame DeFarge) cannot be avoided. One must ask: What is it that Wall Street has done to enrage these people so that they must “occupy” it? (And never mind all that leftist hand-wringing about violent/martial metaphors for political action.) The answer is as hilarious as it is disturbing.
In the manifesto recently released by the group, a sort of Declaration of Resentments, the protestors have outlined a list of things that “corporations” have allegedly done. For instance, the list charges that corporations have “taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity,” because apparently these protesters see no difference between taking bailouts with impunity and being forced to take them. They accuse the corporations of “holding students hostage” in exchange for education — “itself a human right” (one wonders whether a meal plan, housing in state-of-the-art facilities, and scholarships also qualify as “human rights”). And in a breathless display of failed irony, they accuse these “corporations” (apparently a monolithic force rather than several very different self-interested actors with differing levels of guilt) of “perpetuating colonialism at home and abroad” in the same manifesto in which they declare themselves to be “occupiers”! I could go on skewering this list, but The Daily Caller doesn’t publish novels in its opinion section, and I’m not being paid for my trouble — something these protesters have probably been familiar with for a very long time, judging by the state of their clothes.
We have seen this sort of gathering of shiftless layabouts before in London. So one must ask, how long do we imagine it will be before these protesters also turn violent? The tea party has only been guilty of holding up impolitic signs. Show me a tea party rally where hundreds of people were arrested and I’ll show you a fake news story. By contrast, the arrests already number in the hundreds for these protests, and whatever the corruptibility of a few police officers, it is inconceivable that you could get 700 arrests out of a few overzealous cops. That many people cannot possibly fit in the back of a few squad cars.
How long will it be before these protesters move from “peacefully” obstructing major landmarks and making life difficult for the millions of other people who aren’t complicit with their Wall Street bogeymen, and move straight onto London riot levels of disorderliness? And which apologists for barbarity who have hidden behind their laptops squealing about police brutality will condemn the protesters when they are the brutalizers?
And for what do they claim the moral right to obstruct their fellow citizens? Where is their list of demands? Predictably enough, it has been compiled via that famous instrument of Ron Paul-era democracy: the Internet straw poll. And what is on this list of demands? Nothing less than every liberal pipe dream, going back to the days of Wilson. “Nationalize health care,” “forced acquisition of the Federal Reserve for one billion” (!), “end the war on drugs,” “free education from Kindergarten through College,” and most amusingly of all, “re-investigate the attacks of 9-11-2001,” which clocks in at number five on the list of demands. One wonders what the protesters expect to find in this reinvestigation, besides more smoking wreckage. And surely, given the amount of controlled substances these people consume, they have enough smoking wreckage in their own brains to get on with.
Ironically enough, the demand that falls squarely above this rankly conspiratorial wish is “Repeal the 16th Amendment,” permitting an income tax — the one good idea on the entire silly list, albeit one that is probably motivated more by concern over being deprived of enough pocket money to go to Urban Outfitters than anything else.
Pat Buchanan once described the men who stood against the Watts riots as symbolizing “force, backed by justice.” No phrase could be better applied to the police who have executed “brutality” against these protesters. These protesters want to be occupiers. They brand themselves as the leaders of a “new American revolution.” I say we take them at their word and give them their wish — treat them as occupiers and rebels. It will not be the first time that American citizens have turned on their country’s root institutions in a desperate flash of petulance. If the tea party aspires to be the founders, this pack of insects aspires to be Shays’ Rebellion, and we should squash them just as unequivocally as the Continental Army squashed that. It should not be the last time that America’s localities assert their own brand of law and order against the ill-mannered sponges who take the products of capitalism while bemoaning the greed of those who offer those products up for their consumption.
It is ironically fortunate that this group has begun its uprising in the citadels of American liberalism — Chicago, Boston, New York and Los Angeles — where the natural American resistance to statism has already long been eroded. New Yorkers have given the police the right to yank cigarettes out of their mouths on the grounds that those objects are deemed to be carcinogenic pollutants. Unjust as this seemed at the time, perhaps it is for the best, since now those same officers can stuff gags in the mouths of these aesthetic pollutants. A rebellion by perpetual children that starts in the hotbed of Mommy Government should only expect a good spanking.
Liberals may think they have leaped the barricades. If nothing else, these protests prove once and for all that they have jumped the shark.
Phillip Mencken is the pseudonym of a conservative author.